b. Build your HPC cluster
In this section, you create a cluster based on the specifications defined in the configuration file. To create a cluster, you use the command pcluster create and the –config (or -c) option to use another configuration file other than the default one.
If you create your cluster without using the --config (or -c) option, then AWS ParallelCluster uses the default configuration with the minimum requirements to get a cluster running. For example, the default configuration for head and compute nodes is t2.micro instances instead of c5.xlarge.
In your AWS Cloud9 terminal, run the following to create a cluster. Make sure that the configuration file path is correct.
pcluster create perflab-yourname -c ~/environment/my-perf-cluster-config.ini
Your cluster will take a few minutes to build. The creation status displays in your terminal. Once the cluster is ready, you should see a result similar to the one shown in the following image.
There can be only one cluster of a given name at any time on your account. To check existing clusters, run pcluster list --color.